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Now
Less than a month after I wrote those words, less than a month after I failed to publish them, my world changed. It changed with a blue cabinet that I got off of the local everything is free site, and that I carried into my apartment despite my back telling me that it was a…
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Late Summer, 2021
(note: this should have been published nearly 2 years ago. but stuff happened and it wasn’t. so here it is.) And so and so this is now. This is September, with hopefully the last heat wave behind us, with the pool and the lake closed, with birthday parties in person that we could only dream…
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Finally Writing About the Pandemic
(image from istockphoto.com of some round blue shapes with blue protuberances floating on a blue background.) And so this is a pandemic. Before it actually happened, when people talked about quarantining in your home, I honestly thought that it would mean a week or two, three at the very most, of hanging out…
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In Which Penguins Are Still Birds Even Though They Cannot Fly
(image of a black and white penguin from fairly close up, I’ve no idea what kind, looking to the right.) The Christmas that I was seven, my grandmother gave me underwear and I cried. She was a practical person; she had asked my mother what I needed, then gone out and bought it. The problem…
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Why UU’s Need Autistic People
NB: please see my other post, “what social stories don’t teach you” about a remarkable autistic friend who was a UU almost until she died. It was she that came up with the idea for the elephants, and I was given permission to talk about them here before she passed. Having devoted two previous…
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What Social Stories Don’t Teach You
Carolina died. I wrote this essay on autistic contributions to Unitarian Universalism and I sent it to her and I got permission to use her story about elephants and I meant to publish it sometime in July but somehow that never happened and then it was August. It was a Monday. I had gone…
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Not Dead Yet
I know that it has been forever since I have updated this blog. I stopped writing it because honestly, I was in just too much pain to type. I was very worried that I would never write again because the pain in my arms was so bad. However this fall numerous things have happened, among…
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Ableism on a Sunday Morning
(image of a very generic black and white flaming chalice, inside two rings, from uua.org) (this essay was written into my phone during part of a Sunday morning worship service, then finished at home. It is the result of my very high pain levels and thus low tolerance for, well, everything today. The statements reflected…
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Reaction to the UU World Article Purportedly About Neurodiversity, Spring, 2019 Issue
(image of the neurodiversity symbol, a rainbow infinity sign) I first heard about what my friend and I have decided to call ‘the catastrophe’ on a Monday night. I happened to be away that night, but I read the UU World article online and spent a few hours comforting and being outraged. I noted in…
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Discrimination Across the Rainbow
Ableism in the LGBT community Please note: Identifying details have been altered here, because I believed, and continue to believe, that ‘Millet’ does good work. They do important work. They fought a good fight and I am glad that they won. Many of my friends had positive experiences volunteering with them. I am certain…